Upholstery including beds comprise about 40% of the total furniture production for the home market. While another remaining 40-50% of the furniture production has undergone radical change into highly industrialised production during the last three decades, manufacture of upholstery is still directed to handicraft.
Since the end of the 1960s, the cost effective, highly industrialized production of cabinets, cupboards, book shelves, drawers, tables etc. has produced flat packages for assembly in the homes. The volume of this business has increased from 0% at that time to about 33% in 1993. This has brought about correspondingly cost effective distribution. During that time there has been strictly no development in respect of the production of upholstery due to absence of technical solutions. Thus the conditions for manufacture and transport has remained unchanged during the years.
Environmental friendly products and processes is a challenge for all industry as indeed it is for the furniture industry. Traditional manufacture of conventional upholstery and beds is in rough terms a process for fixing together a number of different materials to each other. This principle makes separation of the products, one of the fundamentals in recycling, into different categories of material, after a finished life period, expensive and difficult. It is also clear that it is difficult for the manufacturer to find environment friendly materials with acceptable technical performance at reasonable prices. Due to the complexness of upholstery of today it is believed that recycling thereof will necessitate starting new specialised plants for recycling. This will further increase the costs for upholstery. As an example it can be mentioned that the cost for separating one single conventional spring mattress is calculated to be a very high amount in the order of around 60 US dollars (as of May, 1995) which of course will be added to the consumer price.
Another problem with upholstery is the substantial weight and volume of the products which makes storage and transport costly and energy consuming.
Other problems are related to beds. In order to buy a bed, a customer is expected to make a decisive choice of the bed firmness/softness after only a few minutes testing. It is well known that many customers regret their choice which, at best, leads to costly and laborious transports for replacement. Conventional mattresses are of course not possible to adapt to altered demands with respect to softness. Another problem connected to beds is allergy caused by dust, pollen and mite, because the difficulty of cleaning conventional beds.
Altogether conventional upholstery is subject to high costs for manufacture, transport and storage and will be subject to increasing costs in the near future due to the responsibility of the manufacturer to assure that the demands for recycling materials and energy, the environment friendliness of all materials in a product as well as energy saving distribution are fulfilled.
Furniture items with pneumatic support structures are well known. Such furniture items are advantageous, since they are transportable in a highly compressed state which facilitate export as well as distribution via mail order. Further features are low weight and low price.
SE-B-368 502 (Dranger and Huldt) describes a body support device with so called spare elements which are intended to be inflated with air, gas or to be filled with water prior to their insertion into a shape defining cover. The elements are intended to be manufactured from e.g. polyvinylchloride and preferably in a seam welding process. This know device, however, comprises several disadvantages mainly due to leakage and/or fractures, particularly in the seams, already after a relatively short period of use. Unfortunately there exists no effective method of repair of the leaking elements. Further, it is time consuming to inflate the elements and no realistic method of adjusting the coefficient of fullness of the elements.
DE-B-426 545 (Dranger) describes a furniture design with a cover which is filled with balloon type bodies. Also this known device however comprises disadvantages with respect to high permeability of the wall material of the bodies, problems with inflating the bodies and with repairing damages.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,533,113 and U.S. Pat. No. 3,829,918 suggest elements for the use as cushions, mattresses or the like, said elements being fillable with air by pulling apart stiff end surfaces, whereby the air enters into the bodies via wall openings. Also these devices suffer from problems in connection with leakage. Their bellowish design as well as the presence of stiff wall parts make them unsuitable as support elements for soft upholstery.
A common drawback of all known pneumatic furniture items is the problem with inflating the elements to a desired extent due to their air inlet openings being adapted to cooperate with the mouthpiece of a pump. Normally said openings are small in size, ranging from 7 to 10 mm. Since pneumatic elements generally are intended to be inflated to such a high extent that a substantial overpressure is created, the pump must be capable of producing the corresponding pressure
A very serious problem with previous pneumatic furniture items is related to leakage. In case of a fracture or a hole in the wall of a support structure element, the user must attempt to place a repair patch covering the damaged area from the outside. This solution is however almost never successful because of often poor adhesion and mechanical influences from external items tending to remove the patch. If the element is seam welded, the most likely place for leakage is in proximity to the seam, which makes an effective repair almost impossible because of the uneven surface in that area. Further, the enclosed air continuously presses the patch outwardly from the area to be patched.
With regard to the problems with known pneumatic furniture items, these items do not provide any realistic alternative to upholstery, since they are not comfortable and reliable enough because they are intended to be inflated to a maximum irrespective the product involving one whole container or being divided into elements. This leads to bad comfort. Further, the price has not been competitive enough, since no true rational production method is envisaged.